More globality

They’ve been filling out the website, too. There’s a Newsletter page, with news stories on it. One news story on that page is titled Roundup of Recent Activities, Honors, and Events of Our SGI Famous Team. Yes really; I’m not making it up; that’s actually the title.

We are pleased to report that many SGI Fellows and communicators have made the news and are engaged in spreading secularism to our growing non-religious brothers and sisters worldwide.

Ouch. Jeezis. Can’t they get a better press person than that? Our growing brothers and sisters? The brothers and sisters are getting bigger, are they?

Michael Shermer’s latest book “The Believing Brain“In this, his magnum opus, one of the world’s best known skeptics and critical thinkers Dr. Michael Shermer—founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and perennial monthly columnist (“Skeptic”) for Scientific American—presents his comprehensive theory on how beliefs are born, formed, nourished, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. This book synthesizes Dr. Shermer’s 30 years of research to answer the questions of how and why we believe what we do in all aspects of our lives, from our suspicions and superstitions to our politics, economics, and social beliefs.

Uh huh. Good choice. Top guy; super-famous; one of the greats. Well done.

The point of organizations like that is to allow the fellows to honor each other. Its an old boys club (with some girls). And of course the fellows get to pick new fellows which is a way to try to pick the future leaders of the movement.

Blackford’s ‘analysis’ of Ophelia’s weird letters looks so much like the statements made by numerous UK politicians as they were covering up the fact that they had allowed numerous children’s homes in the country to be run by pedophiles. There is the determination to look for any explanation but the obvious one.

Depending on jurisdiction, writing threatening letters can be a crime. So it is not unusual for threatening letters to be written as non-threats in such a way as to make it obvious that they are a threat. The Kray twins who terrorized London’s east end would walk into an establishment they wanted protection money and say ‘nice place you have here, shame if something happened to it’, it being obvious who was going to cause the trouble. The Monty Python team ridicule the Kray twins in a few of their sketches. And warning someone that they are in danger is a tactic commonly used by con-artists intending to rob them. And the ‘security’ advice given is stupid. You are almost always much safer in a crowd than alone.

Is it possible this organization is a complete fraud? I’ve tried to contact them using their contact form, but it doesn’t seem to work. I’ve send email to them directly and never gotten a reply. If they are real, then they are giving secularism a really bad name simply for being (a) pompous, (b) obnoxious, and (c) incompetent.

Well I think it’s possible that it’s at least an “organization” that is really nothing more than a list of mostly-male hotshots, and some advertising of those hotshots. It apparently doesn’t actually do anything. It’s just a website. That’s not really fraud, I guess, depending on what “institute” is supposed to mean.

It occurs to me that Ed and PZ should have called this network The Freethought Institute. Why not, after all?

It seems the cutesy description of B&S is supposed to distract us from the real answers & make us go away smiling. GSC should have either left B&S off the website entirely or given a real description of who runs it & for what purpose.

I’d like to know what the GSC/SGI team knows about The Bella & Stella Foundation.

Most of the world’s great minds place precedence on science and reason, but they have often had to act alone. The Secular Global Institute has brought together authors, professors, speakers, researchers, and other fellows to collaborate on many of the most difficult issues facing rational human and political progress today…Worldwide.